If I see one more nice thing written or said about John F. Kelly, I am going to puke. He just agreed to work as Donald Trump’s chief of staff. That tells you all you’ll ever need to know about his character. Let’s stop pretending anything is okay or will be okay. It’s not and it won’t be.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I don’t think that is necessarily fair. It remains to be seen. There are folks in the military (or ex-military) and the intelligence community who see it as their duty to try and stick it out and be a moderating influence on this guy because they realize how truly dangerous he is. Kelly could very well be one of those guys. Saying he agreed to work for Trump proves he’s a shitheel is just lazy.
Who’s being lazy here?
This is what the Chief of Staff does.
We will know within two weeks if he is a real CoS, or just an enabler. He’s the boss of all White House employees….. they report to him, he controls who gets face time. If Bannon, Kushner, Mooch, etc don’t report directly to Kelly, then by your standards Kelly MUST resign.
If he does not resign the first time someone ‘goes off the reservation’, then Booman is right and you are the lazy one.
.
We’ll likely know Monday if Kelly is an enabler. Personally, I am expecting that’s all he will be. One of the first acts would have to be kicking “The Mooch” out of the White House. If he can’t do that, he’s already neutered. As I mentioned, that seems like a safe bet.
I agree. One of the conditions of taking the job should have been firing Mooch.
But then the speculation is that Trump never asked if Kelly wanted the job.
.
Quite a bit of speculation going on. Noticed an article on Vox suggesting that bringing Kelly on board is something of a “dark reboot” for the White House occupant – namely go back to the theme of “be afraid, be very afraid” that was used on the campaign trail.
there’s sillier speculation than that too.
>>Fox News co-host Dana Perino on Friday night suggested former Homeland Security head John Kelly was named new White House chief of staff to clear a path for President Trump to remove Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
(quoted at https:/www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/29/1685262-Is-this-how-Mueller-gets-fired )
Hey, a CEO can shuffle his employees around wherever he wants, give them any assignment, make them do whatever — they all jump when he commands, right? Isn’t that how it works? “Bob, you’re off logistics — I want you to clean house at the Dover plant, get rid of all the deadwood. I expect the profit margin to double there by the next quarter.”
After getting ride of Mooch Kelly must get control of the tweets and never state anything that implies “that the tweets speak for themselves”.
LOL!! Kelly was once in charge of GITMO. His record there sucked, if you care anything about human rights. He knows how to work the press, just like that dipshit senator from Arizona.
>>He’s the boss of all White House employees….. they report to him
sorry no link, but I saw it reported that Scaramucci does not report to the COS but directly to Trump.
That’s my point, unless everyone goes through the CoS, he’s just an enabler.
Kushner, Bannon, Ivanka, Conway, Mooch, etc, all report directly to Trump.
.
The man is actively flaunting the law, obstructing justice, operating a nepotistic grafting brand-building evisceration of the emoluments clause, pursuing nakedly unconstitutional policies in the courts and outside the courts, and endangering our national security and international relations on an hourly basis.
Spare me the bullshit.
law, too!
(Actually, unconvinced he’s flaunting it. That would seem rather odd under the circumstances!)
flout, not flaunt.
did you not read my comment?
It wasn’t that long.
I did helpfully include a link.
sorry
They take their terminology very seriously.
.
the number of people who don’t realize “flout” and “flaunt” are different words with completely different meanings just keeps increasing (“I read booman using it that way, so must be correct, right?” — I’m quite convinced this is how — or at least one way — such misuses/misunderstandings propagate) . . .
. . . resulting in further degradation of the language . . .
. . . and with it, the ability to communicate clearly.
Don’t you just hate it when you post a correction and then realize when it’s too late… OOPS! I sure do, sigh.
And the rhetoric of the President and Scaramucchi during the last week would have caused any person with a decent moral compass to avoid getting in deeper with this Administration. That Kelly chose this week, of all weeks, to dive into the filth and willingly accept the dignity wraith Trump will surely place on him is most of what we need to know about him.
If Trump’s “Brown and black men are subhuman animals who like torturing young white girls with knives for their own amusement and you have the President’s permission to brutalize them” speeches continue, then we’ll REALLY know what we need to know about Kelly.
Unless Trump has restored proper authority and command structure to the Chief of Staff role, which Priebus didn’t have, then not only will Kelly suffer a similar fate, he can kiss whatever professional integrity he had going in, goodbye.
I would not refer to Kelly as a “shitheel” but given all that’s occurred to date, its fair to question not only integrity but also the judgement of someone who would take a job at that level with the Trump administration. And if Kelly’s thinking he can get in the gutter and sling mud with the worst of them, i.e. “The Mooch” then yes, his character is definitely in question.
His performamce at DHS suggests he is something of a shitheel.
Yesterday, I finally had to just tune out the whole world. Everyone up and down the media and political spectrum was latching on to this as the seminal moment that everyone has been waiting for, when Donald Trump will make that long hoped for pivot away from reality TV President to serious and thoughtful President. They all want so desperately to back into their comfort zones of false equivocation and using their comfortable beltway conventional wisdom to frame everything.
The fact is, Donald Trump is Donald Trump. He is not going to change. They need to get over this illusion that there is some magic formula of administration staffing that is going to turn this man-child into something he is just not genetically designed to be. Kelly is just a different chair on the deck of the Titanic, one which just happens to have more appealing upholstery than the ones that have been sitting there for the last 6 months.
This is just the sort of worship of “bipartisanship” for it’s own sake that reflexively infects beltway pundits and babbling heads. But it will only last until Flynn starts opening his mouth and saying the things Trump hired him to say. Then he’ll be just as popular as Trump. I.e. not at all.
Trump is pivoting all right after the Obamacare repeal fiasco – back to his immigration crackdown and militarising and radicalizing police and the army to crack down on dissent. And Flynn is the leader in that charge of insulting and attacking immigrant groups. This is wildly popular not only for the base, but for all those tens of millions of white working class voters who want black and brown people GONE from the country – as in yesterday.
This behaviour has the effect of terrorizing immigrant communities, and suppressing their political power with voter purges, threats of violence to prevent “vote fraud” and general bullying designed to prevent them from voting Republicans out of power.
Only if the rest of America allows itself to be bullied into acquiescence will this tactic succeed. If it only makes people angry and more determined to fight, and vote, then it will backfire. In the long run of course, the Republican party has just destroyed itself, since they have declared total war against an emerging majority of the population.
I think you mean Kelly not Flynn. I know maybe all the Irish seem alike [I’m Irish BTW] but right now I’m betting that Flynn is just singing to Mueller & Co.
I don’t know what you were watching, but I can tell you that on CNN and MSNBC, the only ones talking “pivot” were Jeffrey Lord, Jason Miller, and their paid whore brethren and sistren.
Everyone else, including the normally “serious” commenters like Gloria Borger and Jeffrey Toobin wore the rueful expression of nuclear war survivors. No one suggested Trump would ever be “presidential” or on the verge of becoming something other than the shuffling, raging pile of detritus he in reality is. Had anyone made such a suggestion, he would have been immediately silenced by gales of hysterical, to say nothing of panicked” laughter.
Maybe “pivot” is still in the Fox vocabulary. Here on Planet Earth, even the Trumpalos know better than to employ the word in any but the most mocking tones.
There is nothing in Kelly’s background that convinces me that he will be able to do this job. Being a 4-star general and being Chief of Staff to the president – which is a hard enough job under normal circumstances but is even more so because the current White House occupant is a fool of the highest order – are completely different.
If Kelly has any ‘honor’, he will break Priebus’ record as shortest-serving chief of staff.
It’s becoming the Trump Party…notice how few actual Republicans are still in office? Replacing Republicans with military leaders, even if they’re “Republicans” does not bode well in my mind. Having a person with military background could influence a trigger-happy, hot-headed idiot like Trump to act rashly. Like he always does, but with more support.
I’d say it’s becoming the Trump White House of course, as he’s replacing GOP stalwarts with hard-right crackpot outsiders like “Moochie” and Flynn.
But, each Congressman has its own power base. Right now, GOP Congressmen can’t stray too far from Trump because he’s wildly popular with their base. But, the right wing base of the GOP isn’t enough to win elections. And Congress has ZERO loyalty to Trump. He’s done nothing to make their lives easy, and he constantly insults and ritually humiliates them. Every one of them dreams of putting the knife into Trump, but will never dare.
But, the end result of all the humiliation is that they will take any opportunity to serve their own interests even if that undermines Trump. Zero loyalty whatever. And that alone will stall Trump’s agenda in Congress.
He’s going to have to pivot all right – towards executive action, court battles, and crazy stupid foreign policy manoeuvres, because those are all things Trump can just order done without Congress. And he can’t do anything where he can’t just yell at people and tell them to do what he says, whether it makes sense or not.
He’s going to have to govern essentially without Congress, rather like Obama with a GOP Congress, because they won’t do anything he wants. In this case he’d have to compromise with Democrats to pass anything big, and he won’t do that. It’s not in his nature to bargain with anybody rather than giving orders.
I think with gerrymandering and the GOP voting-suppression campaign in place, they are enough to when U.S. House elections and, increasingly, state/local ones. Especially when you take into account many GOPers who might not be the extreme-rightwingnuts and/or deplorables forming the core of Trump’s support, but still tribally programmed to vote R and could never, ever dream of voting D.
With that one exception, the rest of this seems quite on point to me.
*”fixed that for you”, just in case that needs defining
First, it’s Kelly not Flynn. Second, Trump has no real coherent legislative agenda except to build the wall. Hie entire agenda is whatever the GOP Congress tells him it it going to be. Infrastructure totally disappeared during the transition. Repeal and replace has been a mantra for seven year not an original idea of his. His “ideas” on immigration have Tea Party support but no actual legislative framework.
His entire governing “philosophy” is vengeance against Obama by trying obliterate everything he accomplished over the least eight years. Period. He’s got nothing else.
He just out his entire career in the Trumpster fire
is disturbing and scary.
Their reverence and gullibility towards military (including vets, à la Saint McCain, Flynn), going back through A Man Called Petraeus (as it turned, not such a saint after all!) at least to Ike, isn’t merely precious, it’s dangerous.
This seems to reflect just how low (i.e., lying flush on the ground) the bar has been set for “service” in the Trump admin. Rising through the military ranks does at least imply some minimal competence and skillset for navigating organizational politics and functioning with some kind of success within a large, complex organization/bureaucracy — not useless in government.
But that’s it.
And when the media adopt that deferential posture while remaining oblivious to the authoritarian/submissive tendencies also associated with military “success” (ahem, can you say Colin Powell? I knew you could!) — coupled with the characters of the specific individuals Trump has been selecting (combining that authoritarian/submissive streak with bigotry and rightwingnut extremism) . . . well, the potential outcomes of all that look scary, indeed.
Meanwhile, all the Corporate Media seem able to muster is a collective sigh of relief over having a putative “adult” in an influential position.
Credit where credit is due: the hosts on MSNBC last night were having none of that kind of talk. The impression I got from the various hosts and guests was that Kelly wasn’t some adult hero who would take control, but rather just another yes man who would fail to control the chaos. MSNBC may be on the liberal side of corporate, but it is as corporate as one would expect.
Exactly
I am shocked that nothing is being said about ICE and Kelly’s policies on immigration. Below is just one link. http://www.thedailybeast.com/homeland-security-secretary-john-kelly-ice-agents-belong-in-courtrooms
the Vox article that Don Durito mentioned above is talking about it
This is the Trump administration’s dark reboot
“Kelly represents Trumpism as its most authentic”
I don’t see where Don Durito was talking about this article, but thanks for the link. It is really a chilling read.
Apparently Vlad the Impaler was offered the job but turned it down.
The only reason Kelly took the position is he knows that the JCoS are getting ready to take things over from Trump. 8)
Okay just doing one of the Trump style of Alternative Facts for ya all.
A little humor for all after the heart attacks that is.
You may be closer to the truth than you know.
AG
This seems to have flown somewhat under the radar this week: NPR – Unpopular At Home, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback Nominated For State Dept. Post
Governors don’t usually resign to take such a low level DC position and with the reeling Trump administration no less. Have Kansans been preparing to haul out the pitchforks and tar and feathers? (hope-hope) Or is Brownback positioning himself for a more senior position in the expected Pence administration. That would be two peas in a pod.
Probably going to use the position for some Muslim hating….
>>Have Kansans been preparing to haul out the pitchforks and tar and feathers?
basically yes, I think. not that long ago the legislature passed a big tax increase to start repairing the Brownback budget disaster. That’s a Republican legislature, passing a tax increase over his veto.
Thanks for the Kansas update.
It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.
I can’t believe these ostensibly intelligent and successful men don’t look at the procession of disgraced and/or fearing indictment former Trumpkins, dignity wraithes after Josh Marshall, marching out of the white house- that they can look at that sorry parade of Trump’s refuse, and think, “well that won’t be me. I’ll last.”
Massive egos will do that to people.
I am now reading that Trump may try to move Sessions from Attorney General to HHS Secretary to take the place of Kelly. Not sure whether, even if true, that would require a new Senate hearing/approval or not. Or whether Sessions would go for that (although he could persecute a lot more people as HHS Secretary).
Ayup.
Yep – DHS. And I am very sure that would require the Senate to go along. The Senate is already going to prevent him from recess appointments, so that’s not happening.
Oops, yes, I meant DHS not HHS. Thanks for catching.